Flashback: Joy Division Appear on the BBC in 1979

There isn’t much video footage of Joy Division out there. When frontman Ian Curtis committed suicide on May 18th, 1980, the group had only released one album, and they hadn’t once performed anywhere outside of Europe. Needless to say, the band’s legacy has grown with each passing year and it’s hard to walk down the streets of New York these days without seeing someone wearing an Unknown Pleasures T-shirt. Here’s an incredible video of the group performing “Transmission” on the BBC2 program Something Else on September 15th, 1979. The video begins with English performance poet John Cooper Clarke reciting his famous work “Evidently Chickentown.”